A colt by the successful young sire War Front sold for $190,000 at Keeneland’s November sale on Wednesday, a record auction price for a West Virginia-bred weanling. Kingsbury Stables bought the colt from 84-year-old West Virginia breeder Buck Woodson.
John Phillips’s Darby Dan Farm in Lexington, Ky., has hired Robert Hammond as its general manager. . . . Grade 1-winning millionaire Gayego will enter stud next year at Canada’s Norse Ridge Farm, where he will stand for $6,500 in Canadian funds. . . . Track-record-setting Grade 3 winner Niagara Causeway will relocate within Kentucky from Buck Pond Farm to Margeaux Farm for the 2012 breeding season, but he will retain his 2011 fee of $3,000 for the coming year.
Sheikh Mohammed al-Maktoum’s Darley Stud announced Thursday that it will double Bernardini’s stud fee, from $75,000 to $150,000, for the 2012 breeding season.
Fasig-Tipton Midlantic’s Dec. 5 winter mixed sale, which features Phase II of the Flying Zee Stables dispersal, has a 395-horse catalog.
The late Ned Evans’s Spring Hill horses continued to exert their influence on Keeneland’s November breeding stock sale at Thursday’s fourth session, but it was another dispersal that produced the session-topper.
Mike O’Farrell’s Ocala Stud Farm on Ocala, Fla., has raised High Cotton’s fee from $2,500 to $5,000 on the strength of his first crop’s performance this year at the races.
Being able to sell a Breeders’ Cup winner at auction just days after the race almost always boosts a price, sale executives say, but today’s Thoroughbred buyers consider much more than a race result when they splash out that kind of money.
Hill ‘n’ Dale Farm in Lexington, Ky., will raise the fees of two stallions, Stormy Atlantic and Indygo Shiner, for 2012, but also is trimming fees for three of its stallions, including champion Midnight Lute.
Bidding throughout the brunt of the nine-hour session Wednesday at the Keeneland November sale was workmanlike but brisk until the last hour, when Seth Hancock of Claiborne Farm went to $1.85 million to buy Quiet Now, a 6-year-old half-sister of Horse of the Year Saint Liam, and Coolmore shelled out $700,000 for a 9-month-old Tapit filly who is a half-sister to a filly Coolmore raced.
Buyer information, auction prices and more from day two of Keeneland's Fall 2011 sale.
